Single European Sky: The Architecture of U-Space investigates a transformation in the expertise designing 21st century cities by tracing the practices inventing U-Space, its builder’s promissory claims, and their urban implications. U-Space, an EU specific term, presents an emerging framework created by aerospace’s builders, regulators, and promoters for introducing drone mobility and freight into the skies above European cities. More than concrete and steel, the architecture of U-Space implies a network of media used for planning, testing, validating, and scaling an ambitious technoscientific urban vision.

This project interprets the underlying values of U-Space through the larger project of European integration, specifically the Single European Sky (SES), with national concerns weakened by the logic of efficient movement within a common market. It argues that aerospace experts are translating knowledge first honed for international aviation and adapting it for flight within cities and urban regions. As seen with past forms of mobility, this transformation implies an adaptation of the built environment for the logic and geometry of drones that will produce new forms of urban space and urban life. Unlike the usual way experts see the public as lacking knowledge, this project flips that idea and suggests that experts might not know enough about urban life. As an intervention, this project uses architecture culture for constructing a contact point (or boundary object) between urban and aviation goals.

date

September 2021 -

Team

Simon Rabyniuk

Sergio M. Figueiredo

Bernard Colenbrander